Hire new scouts

And we hire the scouts we need with high attributes in judging player ability, judging player potential, determination and if he is to go to a country where he doesn’t know the language, adaptability.

Bonus tip: If you want to quickly increase your knowledge of a certain area hire a scout that has knowledge in that area.

In other words, if you sign a guy like Massimiliano Mirabelli, you will not only get a very good scout, you will also get a high level of knowledge and Italy and England.

4

Send scouts out on assignments

The next step is really important and will ensure you will not have to think about scouts again.

The first thing to do is go to the scouting overview and cancel all current assignments.

Do that by clicking the minus sign in the highlighted row on the right.

With that done we are going to do a bit of planning and I have a set of rules when coaching a Premier League team.

SCOUT PRIORITIES

1. I want one scout to only focus on scouting next opposition

2. I want to keep one scout free for doing reports on players I am interested in

3. I want to always monitor the ten best leagues in Europe + Brazil and Argentina. I will thus dedicate a total of 12 scouts to only this

4. I want to scout the entire world

Starting with number 1, we set our scout with the best tactical knowledge to scout the next opposition. That is the only thing he’ll do.

Next, we want to figure out who will not be getting any assignments.

We want one of our very best scouts to do this job.

He should thus have high judging player ability, judging player potential, determination and adaptability as he will be travelling everywhere.

David Williams is the chosen one.

Next thing to do is set up our 12 country coaches.

Here I want the scout to both search for established players and youth players.

First, we set up a scout for England to look for established players.

Next step is to:

1. Set duration to ongoing (very important)

2. Go and select the scout to do the job

3. Click start assignment

After having pressed “recommended by chief scout” you can select who you want to do the job. Here you should select a scout with high knowledge of the country (England) and someone who hasn’t been given an assignment yet.

And remember, David Williams we do not give any assignments.

Click confirm and start assignment.

Now go do the same for the other nine leagues in Europe + Brazil and Argentina. The countries you want to scout are:

​Spain

Germany

Italy

France

Portugal

Holland

Belgium

Russia

Ukraine

Brazil

Argentina

Finally, we want to make sure we scout the entire globe for both senior and youth players.

To do so, assign a scout to every region there as above and you’re good to go.

Here you should look to have scouts with high adaptability and determination as they will be travelling a lot.

Note: You will be finding a lot of players, that are not suitable for your team with this method. However, this method also allows you to never have to touch the scouting setup again and once the scout is up to speed in a country, he will get faster at scouting.

Now you try it

We hope this guide and our checklist helps you get through all the backroom stuff when joining a new club in FM 17.

It takes some extra time and effort, but once you have done it you never have to do it again

I hope you’ve liked the guide and I’ll be around to reply to comments and answer questions.

Leave a reply:

Hi Rob. Glad you liked the article. Unfortunately scouts can only have one ongoing assignment and it will basically “block” the scout from doing the next assignments.

I willy update the article to reflect that. What I would advice for you is to set up a scout to do assignments 3 months at a time.

As an example say you have a scout covering the two regions UK & Ireland and Scandinavia. I would set it up so that the scout would do 3 months in UK & Ireland and then 3 months in Scandinavia. If I set this up on the 1st of July I now the assignment will be over by 1st of January next year after which I will simply reboot the process.

If you’re worried about forgetting to reboot your scouts you can simply go set a note to yourself under Home–> Notebook and then add a note telling you on January 1st to reboot the scouts.